I was going to respond to that ridiculous “God Made a Farmer” Chrysler ad that ran during the Super Bowl using the voiceover of Paul Harvey’s speech of that title as narration. Showing a lot of white people (and one black person!) farming, the ad was a million ways of problems. Between ignoring the actual people who do farm work in this country (Latinos) and the fact that farming is a hard, low-wage job where people struggle to keep their land in the face of increased centralization and corporatization, the ad was a giant lie. Which is like most advertisements, but this was especially egregious.

I was also going to remind everyone of what a reactionary Paul Harvey by providing some quotes from a book of talks by Harvey that was published in the late 60s or early 70s. It is full of hating on beatniks, how the kids have a lack of respect for Richard Nixon, and various other Abraham Simpson moments. Unfortunately, I can’t find it.

Comments (101)

While as inaccurate as could possibly be imagined, what’s really amazing, and hilarious about this ad is that Chrysler forgot that back in the day even farmers thought Paul Harvey was a particularly extreme form of performance art. Anyway, it’s not that different from the ultra-macho voice of Sam Elliott who usually touts Dodge trucks.

Yes, America has always valorized and mythologized the small farmer. But… hasn’t it usually valorized and mythologized them as people who bust their asses from dawn to dusk, at the mercy of the elements, subject to the vicissitudes of the market, in order to produce the food that nourishes us all and support their families?

That’s… kind of true, isn’t it? My understanding of history is that American small farmer spent two hundred years getting the shit kicked out of them until finally being mostly destroyed or subsumed into giant agribusiness. Their hard work deserves a little valorizing, doesn’t it?

Now, granted, there’s an ugly strain in that mythology. The strain that paints the (usually white) small farmer as somehow purer, more virtuous, than the great unwashed masses of the cities. (The Jefferson quote in that linked blog is pretty representative of that.) But I’m kind of okay with that. All mythologies have their ugly sides. You yourself, Erik, are not shy about confronting the dark side of even beloved labor icons like Cesar Chavez.

I despise Paul Harvey, but I liked his paean to farmers. I found it kind of moving. Yeah, it was sort of disgustingly hypocritical, but so are a lot of great speeches. And it doesn’t really ‘ignore’ the fact that farming is a hard, low-wage job; isn’t it sort of about exactly that?

It DOES ignore exactly WHY farming is a hard, low-wage job. That I’ll grant you.

To be brief, if we want to combine our farmer mythology with actual policies that support small farmers, that’s one thing. But farmer mythology is all about making urban/suburban people feel good about their nation/question their masculinity/spur consumerism/etc.

But farmer mythology is all about making urban/suburban people feel good about their nation/question their masculinity/spur consumerism/etc.

Hmmm.

I’ll just say that the farmer mythology I’ve been exposed to has always made me feel the opposite of all those things. It HAS made me question my masculinity, I suppose, but only in the sense that I know I wouldn’t last ten minutes trying to do backbreaking physical labor.

But that has always lead to the thought that maybe I ought to show some respect to the people who pick my food, prepare my meals, and clean my office.

Don’t worry, no actual farmers or farm workers were valorized in the course of that commercial.

Food is most often picked by brown, uhm, undocumented workers – which is a step up, I suppose, from cotton being picked by black slaves. But it’s not as big a step as it should be. The white folks whose farms failed during the dust bowl were held in high esteem and valorized as “Okies.”

To the extent a US farmer is picking food he’s usually doing it by sitting in the cab of a very large, very expensive mechanical device. That’s hard work, for sure, but it not the same thing as picking cotton or picking grapes or lettuce or bell peppers. And, of course, a lot of what we eat is picked and grown by people in South America or elsewhere.

It is really more like – I am going to do shitty work for 40 years because my dad did the same before me. With the subsidies and price supports, I might be able to turn a profit this year. I always wanted to pass the homestead to my boys but they moved away once they graduated in order to find work. (The grandkids love to play with the calves when they come visit.) Couple of years ago, I had to to get a hired man since my back is shot. Esteban is a pretty good worker and his wife makes us tamales sometimes. Put them up in the old farm house since I couldn’t pay’em much in wages. Hope this year is better than the last.

Spot on. The goal of this ad is to make Mr. Suburban Commuter think, “Hmm, I can’t nurse a horse or plow a field or do all of those other things that farmers do…but I can buy a truck, and it will be sort of the same thing.”

I don’t think we should even combine our farmer mythology with actual policies that support small farmers. The reality is that we have a huge population and that means we need farming to be a mechanized, impersonal, large scale industry. We should make our peace with that and, of course, focus on policies that support farmWORKERS (such as immigration reform, card check, and strengthened minimum wage laws).

Small farmers are themselves a fetish. They can’t efficiently feed the nation and are basically irrelevant to our food supply policies. Putting them up on this pedestal makes no more sense than trumpeting the owner of a single limousine as the man who transports America.

What you and most others don’t realize, and myself living in the middle of agriculture, I will say that there are VERY FEW farmers who are busting their ass to feed anyone now days. Lots of stroking by farmers about this commercial however. This speech was written in a time when farming was a working job. Now, my neighbors have 2000 acres that they get done with million dollar equipment, air conditioning, and auto steer and gps so they can take a nap with their feet up. To say that farmers now days are hard working is a slap in the face to the real hard workers in America. Ranchers, yes, they are still working as hard as ever.. But do not for once instant believe that anyone in the US heartland is working up a sweat to put cereal in your bowl in the morning. What they do is make a killing off feeding everyone while they take the winter off to do nothing.

No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad be comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interests, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking–that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John Baptists–these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only one issue ever fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.

Yes, except he also excoriated businessmen(he worked in his fathers’ business before the elder Mencken died), college professors,(a college president blamed Mencken for a series of suicides of students in the 1920s), the Christianists behind Prohibition(wowsers he called them), and of course, politicians of all parties and stripes.

Paul Harvey is also the Indian chief in The Frontiersman, who explains to Gary Cooper that he is a dead man when the full moon fills the open hole at the top of the teepee– that is, unless Cooper betrays what trail it was was taken by a U.S. cavalry outfit transporting repeating rifles, so that it might be ambushed by Paul Harvey’s warriors.* It is a remarkably powerful performance by the ham actor.

*(Cooper naturally keeps his cool, but Jean Arthur wimps out and betrays the column rather than watch Cooper burn to death).

And in the eighth millennium after farmers had made themselves, they looked around on their nightmarish workload and said, “Jesus Christ, this is horrible, we need an explanation.” So the farmers (okay, some herders, too) made God. And he was a real dick.

We didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which–feeling guilty about their savage pasts–eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.

That’s actually the *less* repellent part of that Harvey speech. The topper:

Following New York, Sept. 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity.

We gave old pals a pass, even though men and money from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon.

We called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we’re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies — more moral, more civilized.

He’s basically whining because we didn’t NUKE the Saudis and anybody else suspiciously Mooslem-looking, and implying (in the part you quoted) that America is doomed to the dustbin of history for insufficient bloodthirst. Apparently the “we” in “we mustered our humanity” doesn’t include Mr. Harvey, genocide-boner and all.

Maybe I missed something, but when did Harvey go completely into RW-nutter land? I remember hearing him on AM radio as a kid, and he seemed like a slightly cranky old grandfather – not the sort of guy who’d go on a tear about how we national supremacy and our the protection of our precious bodily fluids required that we kill more people.

[…] are a couple of links for you tonight, from Eric Loomis: God Made a Farmer? – Lawyers, Guns & Money I was going to respond to that ridiculous “God Made a Farmer” Chrysler ad that ran during the […]

I had to turn the channel, came back 3 different times and it was still running. It was pure-n-tee farmer pr0n. I’m waiting for the ad where they lionize/suck-off software engineers for two straight minutes so I can feel great about buying their product–and no, the GoDaddy face-sucking close-up ad was just as equally revolting/disgusting as the farmer commercial. Thirty seconds might have worked but saying “so God made a farmer” 900 times in two minutes in that awful dead drone was beyond overkill.

I do not see how this commercial can be seen as any more evil than every commercial that came before or after. There’s nothing egregious about this ad that isn’t true for every “serious” commercial.

They’re selling to people who believe they hold traditional farmer values. And I expect most of the criticism of the commercial is really meant for them. Which is fine and all, but you don’t beat them by complaining about certain inaccurate ads.

And it’s CERTAINLY not more bullshit than every single flipping commercial on television. That’s the genre. Just compare it to the Clint Eastwood Detroit commercial from last year that got a lot of positive buzz. By consuming you shall show American resilience says a deadbeat dad.

And on the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So, God made a farmer.

God said I need somebody to get up before dawn and milk cows and work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. So, God made a farmer.

King James version:

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

weirdly enough i’m theoretically the guy paul harvey was talking about – and i have to admit the old crook was on top of his smarmy, snake oil peddling, pandering to the hicks game with that particular monologue. it would certainly be nice if some of that was true today – hell, if it had ever been true.

the thing i wonder about, after reading the mencken quote above, which i mostly agree with, is when the hell did henry mencken ever give anything up for the common good?

Must register a mild dissent from most of this commentary. I currently work with the UFW and can agree that this ad ignores the modern farm workers in much of the country. I also agree that Paul Harvey was not noble, to say the least. And will grant you that using this to sell a Dodge truck is mercenary. However, I also have multiple relatives who were or still are engaged in farming in the upper Midwest – they are the proverbial small family farmers that are disappearing. But there are still those who do work very hard, very long hours, in difficult conditions, and are not selfish and selfcentered. They often feel ignored and underestimated. So for my late uncles and aunts and cousins and with their families who are the epitome of the family farmers – I really don’t mind that they felt for a moment that they were valued by most of us – even if the praise came via a not so subtle sales pitch. Not all that different than I feel about my personal opposition to our engagement in military conflicts but I can respect those who often enlist in our military – often for economic reasons and end up serving in awful situations at the risk of life and limb.

You’d be surprised at how many people this ad *is* good enough for. My Facebook just about exploded with people wetting themselves over how “honest” and “genuine” this ad is. When I engaged some of them in discussion about why that’s not the case (drawing from both my admittedly incomplete understanding of the farming economy as well as my quite thorough understanding of modern advertising techniques), their brains just shut. The. Fuck. Down. “But farmers *do* work hard.” “No, you’re thinking of cattle ranching, not farming.” “The Jeep ad was worse.” “But *all* ads are manipulative.” “Why are you so anti-farmer?”

I gave up. The ad made them feel something, and since they are too smart to respond to obvious emotional manipulation techniques, that means those feelings were in response to something genuine. Which is obviously not true, but it’s the kind of “logic” that advertisers depend on.

how far do we have to go back to where most americans lived on or near a farm? 100 years? maybe a bit more? that isn’t all that much time, really, considering the thousands of years people spent grubbing an existence out of their surroundings. i think that has a genuine emotional pull on some subconscious level – maybe it’s as simple as ancestor worship?

While there have always been well-off, powerful landowners, the rise of the giant agribusiness is a relatively recently phenomenon. It was true within living memory that most of this countries food was in fact produced by small farmers, and generally speaking, their reward was low prices, desperate, year-to-year living, and being preyed on by banks, commodities speculators, and other such fine upstanding individuals.

While I’d prefer it to not come from a Bircher shill, those people deserve some props. Thinking that isn’t some form of psychological problem or ancestor worship, it’s a legitimate moral position.

murc: ‘ancestor worship’ was a poor choice of words on my part. i was just trying to say that i think people aren’t as removed from the old agrarian usa as erik and some others say, and that’s part of why the dodge ad resonated with them.

i went farming in 1985. i’m living the shift from farming to agribusiness. i appreciate the props 1,000x more than the harvey-style pandering.

Chrysler must have taken inspiration from the film the Army and Air Force Exchange Service plays during the national anthem in their military movie theaters. Apparently, not a single black person or other person of color serves or has served. Even when you serve your country, you still get white-washed out of it. Sad.

You sir Are an idiot . Latinos do not make up as big of a group as you think go to the mid west were you see the “white” farmers that do the chores and field work from the time there six or seven till there 90 years old. Tell that to all the high schoolers who pick up a summer job working for the farmer were I come from the Latinos work in meat packing plants not the farmers field .

That’s only because the only non-mechanized part of planting and harvesting corn and soybeans is detasseling. Very few independent farmers these days even mess with raising animals. Go look at their dilapidated barns and you realize this hasn’t been a reality in farming for 40 years.

During the 1890s, the Populists wanted to enter into an alliance with the growing blue-collar workers. Samuel Gompers refused the offer for alliance because he saw farmers as a form of employer rather than a fellow worker because of all the hired labor needed. It was the early days of agri-business.

Erik’s right. A lot of Americans view farmers as people who work their own land only aided by their families and some machines. This isn’t really that accurate. Farmers have a lot of Hispanic labor and probably don’t do a lot of physical labor themselves. Their business owners who don’t dress up for work.

Back 100 years ago, it would be pretty common for a farmer to have a hired hand or two along with a hired girl to help in the house. That’s not true anymore.

Midwest farming doesn’t even require low-wage Hispanic labor. A lot of the old manual work went into raising livestock, and the only thing that has hung on a little bit is small milking operations. Nearly everything else is in those concentration hellholes full of millions of chickens and pigs.

I personally liked the ad. I didnt think of Harvey, big corporate farms, or advertising propaganda and manipulation. And no it didnt make me want to buy a truck. It made me feel good for my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather. My brothers and I grew up on a small family farm that they worked years before us. There was a sense of pride in working hard, going to school, then coming home and working hard again, completing tasks and chores, and taking care of your animals. We didnt have slaves or latinos. We did it. It was hard work. Been there, done it. Farming used to be about making enough money to keep the farm, maintain the farm, provide food for family and country..not subsidies, millions of dollars, or three piece suits. So I felt the ad was aimed in that direction..giving props to the small farmer that stayed committed every single long day. It hasnt always been about big money..it used to be about a little money, sacrifice, and survival. Some survived, some got huge, most had to shut down. If you felt disgusted by the commercial or dont know how you feel, follow and work with a true family farmer for about a month. Get up when he gets up, eat with him, milk the cows when he does, haul hay with him, work when your sick. No sick days or call-ins when the cows need you. You will probably then see the ad in a different light. I cant guarantee that but i can just about guarantee you will not be choosing to start a farm anytime soon.

Well said Will. So many people are out to find something wrong with everything in our society. I’ve worked with dozens of farmers who could stand in this commercial. Good hard working Americans who take pride in what they do. Be proud of your heritage!

Yes, your father’s father, and his father, worked the land. So did mine.

Now, it’s…to quote Don Henley, “The big boys, they all got computers; got incorporated, too
Me, I just know how to raise things
That was all I ever knew
Now, it all comes down to numbers
Now I’m glad that I have quit
Folks these days just don’t do nothin’ simply for the love of it”

Which was Erik’s point. Yes, the generations that preceded ours deserve our gratitude.

Besides, these were Harveys words from 1978. Farming communities are much different now. Back then, the words were meant to be inspiring. Govt got involved, Big Ag, and ruined families and ways of life. Remember “Farm Aid”? That was help and charity for all the failed and bankrupt farms. Ironic, farmers needing help and food from others.

Actor 212,
Yeah i know, dead era. But that era should feel proud for busting there ass. They should get some props, which was my point. Didnt u feel proud for your family that worked the land? It was hard work, but i do miss those times and that era of grit.

Yeah, uhh, you’re a dumbass, and I can tell you’ve never even been to any part of rural America. You’ve only read a few books about it, and already feel like an expert on the subject. It’s a good commercial, and was a kind tribute to the people who actually get up and do those jobs every morning. Every farmer and rancher I know loved it. So next time, maybe give a review on something that pertains to your life. Maybe a gay porn site, or something.